The thesis analyses Austrian security policy after 1989. After the end of Cold war new possibilities appeared which changed the concept of neutrality and opened door to new opportunities regarding cooperation, for example in a field of security and crisis management. Apart of this, security threats changed and forced Austria to modify its doctrine of neutrality. Membership in the European Union or in an Eastern Partnership gave new perspectives to the Austrian involvement. Contemporary collaboration with Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe remained if not increased. Home political debate about being a member of EU and NATO showed its limits in a sense that neutrality is still something very essential to Austrian national identity. The next reason for Austria being neutral is simply that does not possess infinite amount of finance or human resources which would let domestic political elite change perception about their state neutrality.

The change in Swedish foreign and security policy that took place during the post-Cold War era is well known. Sweden left the foreign and security policy based on the principle of “nonalignment in peace, aiming at neutrality in the event of war” and headed towards international cooperation within the field of foreign and security policy as well as signing the Lisbon Treaty in 2008 with the EU, which included the principle of solidarity. By implementing a role-theory based analysis, this thesis aims to contribute to an understanding of the changes in Swedish security and foreign policy, which developed after the signing of the Lisbon Treaty in 2008. The research stretches from 2006 until 2011 and examines Swedish foreign and security policy role change and role conceptions by using a comparative case study design of the Swedish Government’s annual foreign declarations. Finally, this study suggests that Sweden no longer perceives itself as a neutral state, but rather as a solidarity state. This shows that Sweden’s foreign and security policy has gone from neutrality to solidarity. In conclusion, the study’s result is that Sweden’s foreign and security policy change from neutrality to solidarity would not be possible without the changes in the foreign policy role conceptions.

This essay is about gender differences in attitudes towards a Swedish membership in Nato. The selected method for this essay is a quantitative survey method, and the purpose is to contribute to research on influential attitudes towards Nato amongst Swedish citizens. The presented results include the opinions of Swedish citizens that have participated in two surveys. One created by the authors of this essay, and the other by the SOM-institute. Regression analyses were performed to investigate the relationships between the variables. This essay concludes that there are gender differences in the attitudes of the Swedish population towards a Nato membership where men appear to have a more positive attitude. It was also found that there are gender differences in the Swedish population when it comes to concerns about the crisis or a war. That may explain why there is a positive view towards a Nato membership, as women that were worried about a crisis or a war, also are more positive towards a Nato membership.

Nous proposons une méthode multilingue pour l'extraction de phrases biaisées de Wikipédia, et l'utilisons pour créer des corpus en bulgare, en français et en anglais. En parcourant l'historique des révisions des articles, nous cherchons ceux qui, à un moment donné, avaient été considérés en violation de la politique de neutralité de Wikipédia (et corrigés par la suite). Pour chacun de ces articles, nous récupérons la révision signalée comme biaisée et la révision qui semble avoir corrigé le biais. Ensuite, nous extrayons les phrases qui ont été supprimées ou réécrites dans cette révision. Cette approche permet d'obtenir suffisamment de données même dans le cas de Wikipédias relativement petites, comme celle en bulgare, où de 62 000 articles nous avons extrait 5 000 phrases biaisées. Nous évaluons notre méthode en annotant manuellement 520 phrases pour le bulgare et le français, et 744 pour l'anglais. Nous évaluons le niveau de bruit, ses sources et analysons les formes d’expression de biais. Enfin, nous utilisons les données pour entrainer et évaluer la performance d’algorithmes de classification bien connus afin d’estimer la qualité et le potentiel des corpus. / We propose a multilingual method for the extraction of biased sentences from Wikipedia, and use it to create corpora in Bulgarian, French and English. Sifting through the revision history of the articles that at some point had been considered biased and later corrected, we retrieve the last tagged and the first untagged revisions as the before/after snapshots of what was deemed a violation of Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy. We extract the sentences that were removed or rewritten in that edit. The approach yields sufficient data even in the case of relatively small Wikipedias, such as the Bulgarian one, where 62k articles produced 5 thousand biased sentences. We evaluate our method by manually annotating 520 sentences for Bulgarian and French, and 744 for English. We assess the level of noise and analyze its sources. Finally, we exploit the data with well-known classification methods to detect biased sentences.

This thesis examines the tension between humanitarianism and nationalism byfocusing on the Sahrawi and Palestinian refugee cases. These cases represent a challengeto both nationalism, which presupposes national identity as being congruent with theestablished political borders and rooted within their limits, and the claim of neutrality, asnot favoring any side in an armed conflict or dispute and bearing no national allegiance.Firstly, Palestinians and Sahrawis, while claiming a nation without land, have created anational identity in up-rootedness, and express political fights that are nurtured by thevery humanitarianism. Secondly, the refugee camp, as a humanitarian product, has beenaccused of depoliticizing and reducing life to mere survival, and I will explore how it hasparadoxically become a hyper-politicized space providing the grounds for nationalidentities and national claims to develop. For Palestinians and Sahrawis, I will argue,humanitarian interventions are in fact the very reason for politicized identities to arise.

Now a days, the society thinks about more sustainable and clean energy sources. Most of the countries in the world relay on non-renewable energy sources for the generation of electricity. This results in the scarcity of fossil fuels in future and also increases the production of carbon emissions. This thesis considers a metro system named Kochi Metro which is a rapid transit system serving in the city of Kochi in Kerala, India which uses renewable sources, mainly solar, for giving power to the Metro.In this thesis work, trying to analyze the measures adopted by Kochi Metro Rail project in potential reductions of energy consumption and energy generation both contributing to energy efficiency.With the help of Matlab, different levels of installed PV power are used to find out the possible self-usage, self-sufficiency, and energy neutrality of the system.

Several studies have argued that there exists a hegemonic, secularist discourse within Swedish classrooms, which implies a way of talking about religion as something irrational, outdated and restrictive in concern for individual freedom. Within this discourse, a non-religious or atheistic position is seen as neutral and unbiased, whereas a religious position is considered the opposite. This, I mean, is problematic against the background of the Swedish curriculum, where it is stated that some of the main goals with religious education (RE) is to help students develop tolerance and understanding for other people, with other beliefs than one’s own. Thus, the aim with this paper is to investigate if and how, a teaching material that is being used within the Swedish RE education, can express a secularist discourse and what implications the results may have for a neutral RE. By using a modified version of discourse analysis together with theoretical contributions from Karin Kittelmann Flensner, I have analyzed four episodes of the audiovisual teaching material/reportage series Från Sverige till himlen to try to answer how one, from a critical perspective on a secularist discourse, can interpret representations of religion in the reportage series. The conclusion is that the series portrays religion in accordance with especially four themes within the secularist discourse, namely; Criticism of Religion, Prime Time of History, Individualism and a Neutral Position. These results indicate that students need to be trained to critically examine not only religion, but also, and maybe in particular, what is taken for granted as the normal and neutral in a secular culture.

This thesis intended to examine how the actions of Sweden, following the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, fit within the international relations theoretical perspective of pragmatic idealism, focusing on the actions of Sweden's foreign policy that impacted its neutrality policy. This thesis is built upon the pragmatic idealism theoretical perspective of international relations, and attempted to address how this perspective accounted for, or failed to account for the actions of Sweden in the face of the escalating Russian threat. The analysis herein is grounded in case study methodology. First, the thesis examined how Sweden-Russia relations evolved in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Second, the thesis examined how Sweden-NATO relations changed after the 2014-15 annexation of Crimea by Russia. In both cases, the paper analysed how the evolution of these relationships affected Sweden's neutrality, and how the evolution was consistent or not consistent with the “pragmatic” and “idealist” dimensions of the theoretical perspective of pragmatic idealism. The culmination of this paper drew an inference of the applicability of the perspective of pragmatic idealism to Sweden's application of neutrality to international relations. It concluded that Sweden's neutrality both prior to and following the invasion, as well as its subsequent actions, were in line with the theoretical perspective of pragmatic idealism.

The purpose of the thesis is to contribute to grid planning and public debate about how the electric power system can cope with electrification and decarbonisation. The thesis is based on the assumption that Sweden, in accordance with the climate goals, will achieve climate neutrality by 2045. Based on a literature review, an analysis is made of how different scenarios predict the future national electricity demand up until 2045 and identifies the underlying drivers for changes in electricity demand. A more detailed analysis based on results from a literature review and interviews with industry representatives is made for four chosen regions, Norrbotten, Västra Götaland, Stockholm and Skåne. For each region, estimates are made of how high the electrification potential is in the industrial, transport, residential and service sectors. The prerequisites for the electricity grid to handle the identified electrification potential, in terms of grid capacity, have been analysed in order to highlight what challenges there are for large-scale electrification to be a key factor in achieving the climate goals. The general belief in the studied scenarios is that the national electricity demand will increase until 2045. The investigated scenarios predict increases resulting in an annual national electricity demand of up to 207 TWh in 2045, corresponding to an increase of almost 60 %. The most significant increases are due to decarbonisation in the industry and transport sector. The regional analysis shows significant electrification potentials in the investigated regions. A few industries stand out with dramatic increases, Borealis AB in Västra Götaland shows an electrification potential of 8 TWh and 1 000 MW and SSAB in Norrbotten shows an electrification potential of 9 TWh and 900 MW. Significant electrification potentials in the transport, residential and service sectors have been identified in metropolitan areas, i.e. in the region of Stockholm, Västra Götaland and Skåne. The grid analysis shows that it will be challenging to increase grid capacity at sufficient speed. It is concluded that there is currently insufficient grid capacity to meet large-scale electrification, and that the grids need to be reinforced. However, the concession process for grid reinforcements is considered too slow to meet the demands that arise, primarily in the industry sector. Three ways to address this challenge have been identified: -          If the permission process for electricity grid expansion does not change and the industry is to choose the electrification route, this needs to be decided before 2030 in order for reinforcements in the electricity grid to be ensured before 2045. -          Speed up the permit process to allow shorter lead times for power grid expansions. -          The industry choose another route for decarbonisation than electrification. The overall conclusion is that new approaches for expanding the electricity grid will be required if large-scale electrification is to be a key factor in achieving the climate goals in 2045.

Ethiopia was one of the first two countries that Sweden gave humanitarian aid to. In this thesis, Ethiopia is used as a case study to understand how the strategy of Sweden’s humanitarian aid has changed over the past fifty-years. How has Sweden’s humanitarian aid changed over the last 50 years? What factors explain these changes? This is a comparative thesis that uses semi-structured interviews. Sweden’s former minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans Blix (1978-1979), Sweden’s former Ambassador to Ethiopia (2017-2020) Torbjörn Pettersson, Michael Ståhl, Counselor of Development Cooperation at Sida in Ethiopia (1994-1996), and Gustav Lindskog, current Program Manager of Humanitarian Aid at Sida have been interviewed.  This thesis has found that the focus of Sweden’s humanitarian aid to Ethiopia has transitioned from the 1800s-religious-based agenda to the 1970s-socialist-based agenda, and now to a more contemporary liberalist agenda, where democracy, human rights and climate change have become more important. This shift can be attributed to the change in the global order.